J.A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of both the J. P. Beaumont series and the Joanna Brady Series. She has written 40 novels and she has more than 10 million copies of her books in print. Visit her Web site: JAJance.com.

Confessions of an Artifact

Years ago, a friend of ours, a daunting woman well into her eighties, went to Kentucky to visit the museum that had once been her ancestral home. She told us the people there treated her as the "chief artifact." In recent months I’ve enjoyed the television series, Warehouse 13, where artifacts, when left to their own devices, can manage to get themselves and others into a lot of trouble. So, today, I’ll be dealing with life from the perspective of an artifact.

A few weeks ago, at a family dinner, my grandson brought me a picture he had drawn of his mother, yellow hair and all. (Blonde isn’t quite inside the parameters of his five-year-old vocabulary, and I can promise you that as the five-year old gets older, his mother’s "yellow hair" is going to change!) But I asked him that night, "Do I have yellow hair like your Mommy?" He put his little thinking finger next to his eye, squinted up at me, and said. "No, G. Your hair is mostly white." Bummer!

Then last week I heard that the State Department had decided to remove the words Father and Mother from passport applications in favor of the words, Parent # 1 and Parent # 2. Okay. I get it. All families aren’t alike. In second grade, after his father’s death, my son had a meltdown at school during a class project when the kids were supposed to be making gifts for their fathers in honor of Father’s Day. I think it’s likely that my son was the only kid in his second grade classroom whose father had permanently "left the premises." The same was true for my daughter when she was in fourth grade. And it’s most certainly true for my grandson in his kindergarten class where this past year’s Day of the Dead celebration brought on a similar little boy meltdown. But just because our family is different from the norm doesn’t mean that all mention of Father’s Day needs to be scrubbed from our lives or everybody else’s lives, especially in this day and age when fathers can be absent from family life for any number of complicated reasons.

I am well aware that there are some non-traditional families out there, loving families with "two mothers" or "two fathers," for whom those old terms don’t exactly apply. For them, having the option of Parent # 1 or Parent # 2 might be helpful. But what about the rest of us? How do you decide which one of your parents is Parent # 1? I can think of any number of people, my mother in particular, who might not take kindly to being arbitrarily stuffed into the slot of second banana since she was the Commander in Chief on the home front, ordering us to do what needed to be done–dishwashing, housecleaning, rug shaking, blind dusting–while, at the same time, maintaining order and discipline by means of a deftly wielded flyswatter. What happens if the State Department wants to know Parent # 2′s maiden name when the person you’ve put in that slot happens to be a man who didn’t have a maiden name because he wasn’t ever . . . well . . . a maiden? Or what happens if the parents who are on the job turn out to be grandparents of children whose real parents bailed on the job?

So I was relieved this morning to read in the paper that the State Department has now reconsidered that idea. The words Father and Mother will remain, and use of Parent # 1 and Parent # 2 will be optional. Okay I can live with that.

But now we come to my most recent artifact difficulty. If you are reading this, it’s most likely printed the way I typed it–with two spaces at the end of every sentence. Period!! Two spaces. This week I read a piece by a possibly age-challenged young man who turned a holiday family dinner on end by declaring that all sensible people put only one space at the end of each sentence, not two.

His claim is that the two space tradition is a holdover from the old days, prior to the hot type Linotype printing process, when each letter or character was a separate piece of metal. The Linotype machine–basically a "line of type" was invented in the the 1880s by a man named Morganthaler. It allowed for hot metal to be poured into molds and then shot out into a slug, one line at a time. That also allowed for the process of kerning–of putting the letters closer together in a more pleasing and less jumpy fashion. And since the letters in the words went together more smoothly, the Linotype machine was the beginning of the end of the two-space rule. The man was surprised by how vocal and determined the two-space people were in clinging to what he considered to be out-moded beliefs and practices.

I remember that Miss Franklin, the typing teacher at Bisbee High School, was getting up there in age. I hate to think she was so old that she predated Linotype machines, but I can tell you, she was a tigress when it came to two spaces at the end of each sentence. Come to think of it, the typewriters in that class also predated the IBM Selectrics which were, to my knowledge, the commonly available typewriter capable of kerning.

I have it on good authority that most Linotype machines along with IBM Selectrics went the way of the buggy whip in the Seventies and Eighties. I remember how, back in the early sixties when my good friend Pat McAdams Hall and I were serving as co-editors of our high school newspaper, The Copper Chronicle, we would take our copy to the Brewery Gulch Gazette and watch in utter fascination as the words on the pages came out as steaming pieces of metal, cooling on a tray.

None of that happens any more, probably not even at the Brewery Gulch Gazette. The digital era has changed everything.

As for me? I’m still putting two spaces at the end of EVERY sentence. What the printers in New York do with my manuscripts after I finish with them is entirely up to them. They probably grumble about that nutty lady out on the West Coast who is always throwing too many spaces around.

So go ahead. Call me an artifact if you want to. I am one, white hair and all. (And, you’ll notice, there are two spaces at the end of that sentence as well!)

PSMy next book, Fatal Error, Ali # 6, goes on sale on February 1. For details on the book tour schedule, please visit my website, www.jajance.com. E-books are convenient, but they aren’t easy to sign. If you’re interested in obtaining an autographed Fatal Error book mark, please send a request for a signature and any personalization along with an SASE to J. A. Jance, P.O. Box 766, Bellevue, WA 98009.

Please be patient. Due to my travel schedule it may take a little while for those requests to catch up with me. The bookmarks will be traveling with me, so if you can make it to a signing they’ll be there too.